Site of the day: Internet Movie Car Database

I’ve nev­er done a site of the day before, so it may as well be site of the year. Don’t expect a new web­site to be show­cased every day. I think some­one else already had that idea.

Remem­ber back when the Inter­net was full of won­drous sites that cap­tured the imag­i­na­tion and made us think, «wow, this World Wide Web thing is real­ly great?» Peo­ple came up with new ways of pre­sent­ing and sort­ing and fil­ter­ing con­tent and there­fore start­ed putting new kinds of con­tent up on the web. Today it seems like all there is on the Web are stores, news sites, and blogs. Sure, there’s a lot more going on, but some days it just does­n’t seem like it.

Well, it’s not a new site—rather a new-to-me site—but today I was made aware of a web­site that gave me that 1998 feel­ing all over again: The Inter­net Movie Car Data­base. Just as the Inter­net Movie Data­base became a ref­er­ence for peo­ple won­der­ing, «who was that actor?» IMCDB answers the ques­tion, «what kind of car was that?» And cov­ers motor­cy­cles, too (even though the link is to a bike that is mis­la­beled on the site.)

It’s spe­cial­ty sites like this that real­ly make me smile. Google index­es every­thing and any­thing it gets its hands onto and that is of course a use­ful thing but some­times it’s dif­fi­cult to con­tex­tu­al­ize what you’re look­ing for. «I saw a car in that movie with that actress who was in that oth­er movie» some­times just does­n’t cut it with Google. Not that a search like that would get you very far with any web­site or search engine, but when you lim­it con­text its eas­i­er to find the con­nec­tions to the things you want to find.

So kudos to the folks at the Inter­net Movie Car Data­base. It took me six years to notice they were there but I’m glad to see that things like this still exist on the World Wide Web.

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